"The plain fact of the matter is, I don't want to execute code from some random website."
I've been saying for some time that the two worst things to ever happen to the web browser are (in descending order of brain-damage):
1) ActiveX 2) Javascript and Java applets.
For interactive web sites, the browser should be nothing more than a dumb terminal with graphical layout and form submission abilities. All logic processing needs to be kept on the server. If the browser continues to be abused, the web will slide into uselessness and mistrust.
The one author who just about nailed his terrifying vision of the future is George Orwell. His time frame was off by 25-30 years, but that was his only big error.
"So sick of x86. Look at all the cool stuff the graphics card makers are coming up with. Intel needs to buy NVidia to get real innovation done."
This makes no sense. Your logic is:
1) x86 sucks. Intel makes x86. 2) Graphics card makers are doing great stuff. NVidia is a graphics card maker. 3) Intel designed the x86, so therefore Intel's product designs suck. 4) NVidia is making cool stuff, so NVidia's designs are good.
Your conclusion: Intel should buy NVidia so innovation can start.
Your conclusion is in direct opposition to your argument. If anything, NVidia needs to buy Intel to get innovation going. No, neither is going to happen.
"... is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."
Hmm...which version of Windows do I need for that? My computer came with XP.
Okay, it didn't really. I use Fedora Core, and haven't used Windows at home since 1999. However, most of the rest of the computing world gets stuck with Windows, and Windows is exactly as the author portrays it. Most kids nowadays don't even know that programming is even an option simply because their computer doesn't throw that option at them in an easily accessible manner.
Programming adoption by kids in the U.S. nosedived at the exact moment that computers stopped providing an easily accessible, ubiquitously available programming environment that greeted you at boot time.
"Just when I thought interviewing techniques couldn't get dumber."
When I was interviewing for my first professional job many years ago, I was abused with a few "logic" puzzles during the interview. In order to be polite, I endured them when I was really thinking that I should just walk out the door with my middle finger high in the air. I vowed to do that very thing to the next interviewer who tried that same retarded line of questioning (it didn't happen again, so I didn't get the chance).
If the interviewer has nothing more relevant to ask than how long it takes the entire rock band to get across the damn bridge, then that place it just begging to collapse under the weight of its own stupidity. If you ever find yourself in that kind of interview, run -- don't walk -- to the door as fast as you possibly can.
I've been using MythTV for about a month now, and I'm very happy with it. It took a couple hours to get everything worked out on Fedora Core 4. Many thanks are owed to http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ for the MythTV repository. That guy does an awesome job!
The one thing I haven't found is a stand alone front end that streams the data from the recording box rather than requiring an entire download before playing. It's not a big deal, but it would be nice to have.
I love PC gaming for the controllers. The keyboard + mouse controller combo is far and away my favorite controller system for most games. Until the Wii, no console controller ever even stood a chance of comparing positively. I bought the Game Cube and PS2, and played both in a limited fashion solely because of the controllers. I kept going back to PC games (even the limited selection available for my Linux system) mostly because the controllers were far better than the console.
Console gaming is great for most of the (old, rehashed) reasons given in the article, but all of that is overshadowed by the horrible, terrible, atrocious controllers on all of the consoles. The one argument that totally fell flat was the Xbox Live argument. That is probably the single most hollow argument I've ever seen in favor of a gaming system.
The Wii controller is the main reason I'm going to give Nintendo (and only Nintendo. No PS3, and certainly no Xbox) another try. If the Wii doesn't live up to expectations, this will be the last console I buy.
"No, you have no right to tell someone what to do with a picture you send them...."
First, I am not a lawyer.
On to the reply:
This isn't quite true. You have copy rights to any picture you take. By default, no one you send that picture to has the right to publish it. Provided the copyright owners want to claim ownership of the pictures, there are civil suits just waiting to happen. Depending on the nature of the personal information published by the prankster, there may be criminal charges to levy as well.
"Maybe that is why I never understood OS evangelism."
1) It's not OS evangelism (to most of us). It's a matter of being able to freely process our own data and keep our own secrets. This doesn't seem like such a big deal on the surface, but it's everything in the modern economy -- where profits are directly related to one's ability to process data and keep secrets.
2) You've failed to learn from history. An unfree market will artificially raise costs for everyone, barring most of us from participating in the market at all.
3) You've failed to see beyond the next ten minutes. A heterogeneous network is a strong network. A monocultural network, regardless of its other merits, is a disaster waiting to happen. With Microsoft controlling such a large part of a business' network, a single compromise can bring the entire thing down. We need a diverse network, and every node that is not Microsoft controlled makes the network that much safer.
It's not a matter of crushing Microsoft. It's a matter of restoring sanity to the computing world.
"Well, she did something that a lot of people with a lot of power have historically done. She assumed the moral high ground."
She most certainly did NOT assume the moral high ground. She in fact did what many people with power have historically done: she abused that power, probably breaking several laws in the process, thinking herself superior to those working for her.
"Honestly, we're going to run out of new IPv4 addresses to hand out in a few years."
It's certainly hard to see a crisis looming when AT&T is handing out static IP addresses like they're candy. I recently had the desire to host my own Internet presence, so I called AT&T to get a static IP address for my DSL. The cost was only $20/month above what my dynamic DSL account was costing. When the technician came over to reset my modem (AT&T policy, despite the simplicity of the procedure), he handed me a card with my addresses -- all 8 of them. That was a great day.
"I mean, Windows already has a perfectly good filesystem, complete with nifty utilities like xcopy and ntbackup. Sheesh, people will use just about any excuse to push Linux."
Not to mention that Linux already has a perfectly good tool for backing up a mounted partition on a production (or non-production, for that matter) system to some other medium: tar. Shutting down a system and booting a live CD just to do a backup is...umm...how to put this nicely...a bad idea.
Only the basic CNR service is free. Linspire has a Gold service level with extra entitlements (discounts on commercial software, operating system upgrades, etc.).
Like The Blair Witch Project (one of the worst movies in modern times), Snakes on A Plane is aimed at kids. Kids will throw money at anything, as they have no taste (the meteoric rise of rap is conclusive proof).
Any movie which "must be seen on the big screen" is just a shallow marketing ploy aimed at the undiscriminating kid with too much time and money.
"...but to claim a Windows port of KHTML will make Gecko obsolete is rather naive."
That isn't at all what he said. He didn't say that the new KHTML will make Gecko obsolete. He said that the new KHTML's portability to Windows will make Gecko's portability advantage obsolete.
The core standard API is POSIX. The standard 3D graphics API is OpenGL. The standard 3D audio API is OpenAL. The standard 2D graphics API is SDL (which is a shame, because Allegro is much easier). The standard 2D GUI API is XLib (with higher level GUIs made from it). The standard packaging format is RPM.
He's got a point on installers. While there are several installers, there is no common installer/uninstaller. This is where I think that all major distributions are failing horribly. It doesn't matter if the installer is apt, urpmi, up2date, or yum. All the major distributions need to pull their heads out of the asses, and get together to agree on a single installer.
It didn't matter to me what package format was chosen as the standard, but RPM format (actually an RPM format subset) was chosen. All those Debian distributions are doing more harm than good by not adopting it. There are areas where diversity is good, such as the back-end implementation), and areas where diversity is not good (the presentation layer).
The installer falls squarely in the presentation layer, with the package format arguably having a foot in both places: users will be looking for a specific type of distributable, so they should have to look for only one type. They shouldn't have to care about the container format (RPM or Deb).
"I'm going to take issue with this, mostly your last comment. The reason is that your last comment TOTALLY ignores QA time."
I didn't expand upon it in my original post, but I wasn't ignoring the thought. When you code to mature cross platform APIs, QA testing time goes down to almost nothing. The web, thanks to Microsoft and Netscape, is not a mature cross platform technology except for rudimentary HTML. Game making, however, it a different story (I have a some amount of experience here).
For the simplest example, I'll briefly talk about GLUT + OpenGL. If I were to write a functional OpenGL application on Linux using GLUT for the window setup and user I/O, then compile the program on Windows, it would run identically. Period. That's because GLUT is a mature cross-platform technology. My testing phase could reliably be trimmed down to:
1) Does it recompile cleanly on Windows? Ok, it's done.
End of testing.
Instead of DirectX, game makers could use:
1) OpenGL for graphics. This is a VERY mature technology. Any coding to a particular OpenGL version will work on all OpenGL implementations that adhere to the specifications for that version. On all platforms.
2) OpenAL for audio. OpenAL is a fairly mature technology that exists on all major operating systems. While not as rigorously controlled as OpenGL, it has a stable API, and application testing on it is minimal.
I don't know of an industry standard API for I/O control (joysticks, mice, etc), but it's really trivial to create a common thin wrapper around all supported platforms' native I/O APIs without any measurable performance loss. These trivial wrapper APIs only have to be written once for each platform, then testing and support are done. Games then support new platforms with a simple implementation of the wrapper classes on those new platforms. The effort spent creating the wrapper classes becomes insignificant statistical noise in the overall game making process.
All the other parts of a game (physics, player logic, etc), by their very natures, are not platform specific. The entire game core, if the programmers adhered to the language standard and the platform's compiler adheres to the language standard, cross-compiles with no extra effort.
The bottom line is that adhering to cross-platform standards makes porting a non-event.
"There are open source apps you still have to pay to use, aren't there? And if you fail to pay, you lose your right to use the software, no?"
No. Part of the Open Source Definition requires free redistribution in perpetuity. If your rights terminate upon failure to pay, then it isn't Open Source and it certainly isn't Free Software (not that you implied the latter in any way).
Piracy is definitely part of the problem, but only a part. Hell, it may even be a small part of the problem. Here's why I don't buy many games, in decreasing order of importance:
1) Games have stagnated, both on the PC and on the consoles. I have a Game Cube and a PS2. I haven't bought a single game for either of them in about a year and a half. If game companies moved from the PC to the console, this (the single most important reason for me not buying, or playing, new games) wouldn't change one bit.
2) Game makers don't generally port to multiple operating systems. I know I'm in the vast minority of users, but I don't have (or want) Windows. I want and use Linux exclusively. PC games are a luxury item to me, and if they aren't on Linux then I don't play them. If PC game makers would ditch DirectX and move to cross platform development, they would extend their markets with almost no added expense.
3) Games cost too much. I'm sure this is because game production costs have skyrocketed over the years. But that is almost entirely the fault of the game producers themselves. With stagnant gaming ideas (see item 1 above), game producers have focused almost exclusively on increasing the visual appeal of games at the expense of good fun. This is a self-perpetuating spiral that will shrink the gaming market all by itself.
Maybe the gaming industry as we know it today deserves to die off.
"LGP is pretty similar, in the respect that they are porting games to Linux. Similarities end there, I suppose."
While I imagine that LGP is only marginally profitable, it seems to be doing okay for itself. To the best of my knowledge, LGP is being managed as if the owners actually expect the company to be around for a while. Fortunately for LGP, Linux is a growth market with high potential for long term success. LGP is in the position to solve the chicken-and-the-egg problem regarding games and users. There will come a time when Linux desktop growth breaks through the glass ceiling, and LGP deserves to be the company reaping the game distribution rewards.
The ethics of TG's business practices aside, Cedega is next to worthless on a practical basis. As a former paying customer (I opted for the 90 day subscription, and have about 60 days left -- days I won't bother trying to use), I have gotten zero benefit from Cedega. Cedega has been just as much hit and miss with games as plain old WINE.
I have gotten one Windows game to play under WineX -- Call of Duty. I have gotten one Windows game to play under vanilla WINE -- Starcraft.
All the other games I have tried to play have failed. Even Battlefield 2, an officially supported game, won't play for me.
I have bought several native Linux games (Q3A, UT, UT2004, Quake 4, Majesty, Gorky 17), and downloaded the demos from Linux Gaming Project/Tux Games for two new releases (Cold War and X2: The Threat, both of which I plan to buy soon). All the native Linux games have worked great (Majesty crashes sometimes during multiplayer, but the rest are great).
I have come to the conclusion that having no games at all is better than relying on WINE/Cedega. Given the choice between supporting LGP's efforts at native Linux games, even with the limited selection of games available, and broadcasting to game publishers that they need not port to Linux, I'm going to support LGP. It's a no-brainer. I simply won't buy, or even bootleg, games that don't have a native Linux port.
"Loki thougth[sic] there was a marked and ported some games over to Linux (I bought the SimCity version). They closed shop after three years."
Loki didn't close shop for lack of a sustainable market. Loki closed up shop because the company president and his wife were draining the company coffers for personal use.
Slashdot Mirror
"The plain fact of the matter is, I don't want to execute code from some random website."
I've been saying for some time that the two worst things to ever happen to the web browser are (in descending order of brain-damage):
1) ActiveX
2) Javascript and Java applets.
For interactive web sites, the browser should be nothing more than a dumb terminal with graphical layout and form submission abilities. All logic processing needs to be kept on the server. If the browser continues to be abused, the web will slide into uselessness and mistrust.
The one author who just about nailed his terrifying vision of the future is George Orwell. His time frame was off by 25-30 years, but that was his only big error.
"...iTunes DRM since it is actually pretty nice to the user...."
"Nice DRM" is a contradiction in terms.
"So sick of x86. Look at all the cool stuff the graphics card makers are coming up with. Intel needs to buy NVidia to get real innovation done."
This makes no sense. Your logic is:
1) x86 sucks. Intel makes x86.
2) Graphics card makers are doing great stuff. NVidia is a graphics card maker.
3) Intel designed the x86, so therefore Intel's product designs suck.
4) NVidia is making cool stuff, so NVidia's designs are good.
Your conclusion: Intel should buy NVidia so innovation can start.
Your conclusion is in direct opposition to your argument. If anything, NVidia needs to buy Intel to get innovation going. No, neither is going to happen.
"What a load of rubbish. apt-get install bash python gambas2 kturtle fp-compiler fp-units-base php5-cli
The reason children don't code (if that is even true, as it's a completely unsubstantiated assertion) is because they don't want to."
C:\> apt-get install \
bash \
python \
gambas2 \
kturtle \
fp-compiler fp-units-base \
php5-cli
"... is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."
Hmm...which version of Windows do I need for that? My computer came with XP.
Okay, it didn't really. I use Fedora Core, and haven't used Windows at home since 1999. However, most of the rest of the computing world gets stuck with Windows, and Windows is exactly as the author portrays it. Most kids nowadays don't even know that programming is even an option simply because their computer doesn't throw that option at them in an easily accessible manner.
Programming adoption by kids in the U.S. nosedived at the exact moment that computers stopped providing an easily accessible, ubiquitously available programming environment that greeted you at boot time.
"Just when I thought interviewing techniques couldn't get dumber."
When I was interviewing for my first professional job many years ago, I was abused with a few "logic" puzzles during the interview. In order to be polite, I endured them when I was really thinking that I should just walk out the door with my middle finger high in the air. I vowed to do that very thing to the next interviewer who tried that same retarded line of questioning (it didn't happen again, so I didn't get the chance).
If the interviewer has nothing more relevant to ask than how long it takes the entire rock band to get across the damn bridge, then that place it just begging to collapse under the weight of its own stupidity. If you ever find yourself in that kind of interview, run -- don't walk -- to the door as fast as you possibly can.
I've been using MythTV for about a month now, and I'm very happy with it. It took a couple hours to get everything worked out on Fedora Core 4. Many thanks are owed to http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ for the MythTV repository. That guy does an awesome job!
The one thing I haven't found is a stand alone front end that streams the data from the recording box rather than requiring an entire download before playing. It's not a big deal, but it would be nice to have.
I love PC gaming for the controllers. The keyboard + mouse controller combo is far and away my favorite controller system for most games. Until the Wii, no console controller ever even stood a chance of comparing positively. I bought the Game Cube and PS2, and played both in a limited fashion solely because of the controllers. I kept going back to PC games (even the limited selection available for my Linux system) mostly because the controllers were far better than the console.
Console gaming is great for most of the (old, rehashed) reasons given in the article, but all of that is overshadowed by the horrible, terrible, atrocious controllers on all of the consoles. The one argument that totally fell flat was the Xbox Live argument. That is probably the single most hollow argument I've ever seen in favor of a gaming system.
The Wii controller is the main reason I'm going to give Nintendo (and only Nintendo. No PS3, and certainly no Xbox) another try. If the Wii doesn't live up to expectations, this will be the last console I buy.
"No, you have no right to tell someone what to do with a picture you send them...."
First, I am not a lawyer.
On to the reply:
This isn't quite true. You have copy rights to any picture you take. By default, no one you send that picture to has the right to publish it. Provided the copyright owners want to claim ownership of the pictures, there are civil suits just waiting to happen. Depending on the nature of the personal information published by the prankster, there may be criminal charges to levy as well.
"Maybe that is why I never understood OS evangelism."
1) It's not OS evangelism (to most of us). It's a matter of being able to freely process our own data and keep our own secrets. This doesn't seem like such a big deal on the surface, but it's everything in the modern economy -- where profits are directly related to one's ability to process data and keep secrets.
2) You've failed to learn from history. An unfree market will artificially raise costs for everyone, barring most of us from participating in the market at all.
3) You've failed to see beyond the next ten minutes. A heterogeneous network is a strong network. A monocultural network, regardless of its other merits, is a disaster waiting to happen. With Microsoft controlling such a large part of a business' network, a single compromise can bring the entire thing down. We need a diverse network, and every node that is not Microsoft controlled makes the network that much safer.
It's not a matter of crushing Microsoft. It's a matter of restoring sanity to the computing world.
"Well, she did something that a lot of people with a lot of power have historically done. She assumed the moral high ground."
She most certainly did NOT assume the moral high ground. She in fact did what many people with power have historically done: she abused that power, probably breaking several laws in the process, thinking herself superior to those working for her.
"Honestly, we're going to run out of new IPv4 addresses to hand out in a few years."
It's certainly hard to see a crisis looming when AT&T is handing out static IP addresses like they're candy. I recently had the desire to host my own Internet presence, so I called AT&T to get a static IP address for my DSL. The cost was only $20/month above what my dynamic DSL account was costing. When the technician came over to reset my modem (AT&T policy, despite the simplicity of the procedure), he handed me a card with my addresses -- all 8 of them. That was a great day.
"I mean, Windows already has a perfectly good filesystem, complete with nifty utilities like xcopy and ntbackup. Sheesh, people will use just about any excuse to push Linux."
Not to mention that Linux already has a perfectly good tool for backing up a mounted partition on a production (or non-production, for that matter) system to some other medium: tar. Shutting down a system and booting a live CD just to do a backup is...umm...how to put this nicely...a bad idea.
"How are they going to make money?"
Only the basic CNR service is free. Linspire has a Gold service level with extra entitlements (discounts on commercial software, operating system upgrades, etc.).
Like The Blair Witch Project (one of the worst movies in modern times), Snakes on A Plane is aimed at kids. Kids will throw money at anything, as they have no taste (the meteoric rise of rap is conclusive proof).
Any movie which "must be seen on the big screen" is just a shallow marketing ploy aimed at the undiscriminating kid with too much time and money.
"...but to claim a Windows port of KHTML will make Gecko obsolete is rather naive."
That isn't at all what he said. He didn't say that the new KHTML will make Gecko obsolete. He said that the new KHTML's portability to Windows will make Gecko's portability advantage obsolete.
"There is no standardize API's or installers."
The core standard API is POSIX.
The standard 3D graphics API is OpenGL.
The standard 3D audio API is OpenAL.
The standard 2D graphics API is SDL (which is a shame, because Allegro is much easier).
The standard 2D GUI API is XLib (with higher level GUIs made from it).
The standard packaging format is RPM.
He's got a point on installers. While there are several installers, there is no common installer/uninstaller. This is where I think that all major distributions are failing horribly. It doesn't matter if the installer is apt, urpmi, up2date, or yum. All the major distributions need to pull their heads out of the asses, and get together to agree on a single installer.
It didn't matter to me what package format was chosen as the standard, but RPM format (actually an RPM format subset) was chosen. All those Debian distributions are doing more harm than good by not adopting it. There are areas where diversity is good, such as the back-end implementation), and areas where diversity is not good (the presentation layer).
The installer falls squarely in the presentation layer, with the package format arguably having a foot in both places: users will be looking for a specific type of distributable, so they should have to look for only one type. They shouldn't have to care about the container format (RPM or Deb).
"I'm going to take issue with this, mostly your last comment. The reason is that your last comment TOTALLY ignores QA time."
I didn't expand upon it in my original post, but I wasn't ignoring the thought. When you code to mature cross platform APIs, QA testing time goes down to almost nothing. The web, thanks to Microsoft and Netscape, is not a mature cross platform technology except for rudimentary HTML. Game making, however, it a different story (I have a some amount of experience here).
For the simplest example, I'll briefly talk about GLUT + OpenGL. If I were to write a functional OpenGL application on Linux using GLUT for the window setup and user I/O, then compile the program on Windows, it would run identically. Period. That's because GLUT is a mature cross-platform technology. My testing phase could reliably be trimmed down to:
1) Does it recompile cleanly on Windows? Ok, it's done.
End of testing.
Instead of DirectX, game makers could use:
1) OpenGL for graphics. This is a VERY mature technology. Any coding to a particular OpenGL version will work on all OpenGL implementations that adhere to the specifications for that version. On all platforms.
2) OpenAL for audio. OpenAL is a fairly mature technology that exists on all major operating systems. While not as rigorously controlled as OpenGL, it has a stable API, and application testing on it is minimal.
I don't know of an industry standard API for I/O control (joysticks, mice, etc), but it's really trivial to create a common thin wrapper around all supported platforms' native I/O APIs without any measurable performance loss. These trivial wrapper APIs only have to be written once for each platform, then testing and support are done. Games then support new platforms with a simple implementation of the wrapper classes on those new platforms. The effort spent creating the wrapper classes becomes insignificant statistical noise in the overall game making process.
All the other parts of a game (physics, player logic, etc), by their very natures, are not platform specific. The entire game core, if the programmers adhered to the language standard and the platform's compiler adheres to the language standard, cross-compiles with no extra effort.
The bottom line is that adhering to cross-platform standards makes porting a non-event.
"[Open Source] does not necessarily mean that you also have the rights to modify and redistribute it."
Open Source means exactly that. Read the Open Source Definition (it's the first required right).
"Microsoft's "shared source" license is an example of this."
That's why Microsoft didn't call it Open Source -- because it's not.
"There are open source apps you still have to pay to use, aren't there? And if you fail to pay, you lose your right to use the software, no?"
No. Part of the Open Source Definition requires free redistribution in perpetuity. If your rights terminate upon failure to pay, then it isn't Open Source and it certainly isn't Free Software (not that you implied the latter in any way).
Piracy is definitely part of the problem, but only a part. Hell, it may even be a small part of the problem. Here's why I don't buy many games, in decreasing order of importance:
1) Games have stagnated, both on the PC and on the consoles. I have a Game Cube and a PS2. I haven't bought a single game for either of them in about a year and a half. If game companies moved from the PC to the console, this (the single most important reason for me not buying, or playing, new games) wouldn't change one bit.
2) Game makers don't generally port to multiple operating systems. I know I'm in the vast minority of users, but I don't have (or want) Windows. I want and use Linux exclusively. PC games are a luxury item to me, and if they aren't on Linux then I don't play them. If PC game makers would ditch DirectX and move to cross platform development, they would extend their markets with almost no added expense.
3) Games cost too much. I'm sure this is because game production costs have skyrocketed over the years. But that is almost entirely the fault of the game producers themselves. With stagnant gaming ideas (see item 1 above), game producers have focused almost exclusively on increasing the visual appeal of games at the expense of good fun. This is a self-perpetuating spiral that will shrink the gaming market all by itself.
Maybe the gaming industry as we know it today deserves to die off.
"Seems more like a problem with allowing javascript...."
You could have stopped here, and have been even more correct.
"LGP is pretty similar, in the respect that they are porting games to Linux. Similarities end there, I suppose."
While I imagine that LGP is only marginally profitable, it seems to be doing okay for itself. To the best of my knowledge, LGP is being managed as if the owners actually expect the company to be around for a while. Fortunately for LGP, Linux is a growth market with high potential for long term success. LGP is in the position to solve the chicken-and-the-egg problem regarding games and users. There will come a time when Linux desktop growth breaks through the glass ceiling, and LGP deserves to be the company reaping the game distribution rewards.
"Transgaming are scum, no doubt."
The ethics of TG's business practices aside, Cedega is next to worthless on a practical basis. As a former paying customer (I opted for the 90 day subscription, and have about 60 days left -- days I won't bother trying to use), I have gotten zero benefit from Cedega. Cedega has been just as much hit and miss with games as plain old WINE.
I have gotten one Windows game to play under WineX -- Call of Duty.
I have gotten one Windows game to play under vanilla WINE -- Starcraft.
All the other games I have tried to play have failed. Even Battlefield 2, an officially supported game, won't play for me.
I have bought several native Linux games (Q3A, UT, UT2004, Quake 4, Majesty, Gorky 17), and downloaded the demos from Linux Gaming Project/Tux Games for two new releases (Cold War and X2: The Threat, both of which I plan to buy soon). All the native Linux games have worked great (Majesty crashes sometimes during multiplayer, but the rest are great).
I have come to the conclusion that having no games at all is better than relying on WINE/Cedega. Given the choice between supporting LGP's efforts at native Linux games, even with the limited selection of games available, and broadcasting to game publishers that they need not port to Linux, I'm going to support LGP. It's a no-brainer. I simply won't buy, or even bootleg, games that don't have a native Linux port.
"Loki thougth[sic] there was a marked and ported some games over to Linux (I bought the SimCity version). They closed shop after three years."
Loki didn't close shop for lack of a sustainable market. Loki closed up shop because the company president and his wife were draining the company coffers for personal use.